Make Any Pickup Active

Seymour launches Duncan Blackouts Modular Preamp 13-Dec-10

If you love the sound of active pickups but want to try it with a different look, Seymour Duncan has an ingenious solution. Blackouts Modular Preamp takes the preamp out of the pickups and integrates it with the volume pot. Now you can make any passive pickup with four-conductor cable an active pickup. That means you can get that high-gain, low-noise Blackouts sound with a vintage looking guitar. Here's what Seymour Duncan has to say...
Get the extreme gain of active pickups--with any pickup.
Just swap your volume pot with a Blackouts™ Modular Preamp. It combines the high-output, low-noise Blackouts™ preamp with a quality volume pot and our Liberator Solderless Pickup Change System for quick connections. Get your own sound--with your own look.
The genre-defining crunch and wail of modern heavy rock guitar often comes from active guitar pickups, which have a built-in, battery-powered preamp epoxy-sealed into a stark black casing. It's a distinctly modern sound married to a patently modern look. Now, for the first time, you can make any pickup an active pickup, even pickups with a more traditional look.
Seymour Duncan has taken its award-winning, low-noise Blackouts™ balanced differential preamp out of the pickup and integrated it with a high-quality volume pot. Blackouts™ Modular Preamp is an ingenious way to get that high-gain, active guitar sound with any passive four-conductor pickup. Simply by swapping a volume pot for a Blackouts Modular Preamp volume pot, you can get active pickup performance with a more classic look.
To capture the precise tone and performance of Original Blackouts™ pickups, Seymour Duncan created the specially voiced Blackouts™ Coil Pack, a replacement humbucker designed specifically for use with the Blackouts Modular Preamp. The Coil Pack will be available as a stand-alone neck or bridge humbucker or in a two-humbucker set packaged together with the Blackouts Modular Preamp.
Connecting the Coil Pack or any pickup to Blackouts Modular Preamp is an incredibly simple, solderless procedure, thanks to the same bare-wire Lockdown connector stations used in the Seymour Duncan Liberator™ Solderless Pickup Change System. Installing pickups only requires a mini-screwdriver to secure pickup and battery leads into the rock-solid screw-clamp connectors. Pricing and Availability:
See local retailer.More information: